Every June, Sindh’s Chief Minister stands up and announces the province’s share from the federal divisible pool, and every year the number is bigger than the last. This year was no different. Under the National Finance Commission Award, Sindh’s revised receipts for 2025 to 2026 came in at roughly Rs1.879 trillion. For 2026 to 2027, the budgeted figure jumps to Rs2.207 trillion, a rise of about 17.5 per cent. You’d expect that to be good news. More money flowing in from the federal government should, in theory, mean more schools built, more hospitals funded, more roads paved and more water schemes reaching the districts that need them.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Sindh’s Annual Development Programme, the budget line that pays for new infrastructure and public projects, fell from Rs1.018 trillion in 2025 to 2026 to just Rs720 billion in 2026 to 2027, a cut of roughly 29 per cent. Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah didn’t try to hide it. Presenting the budget, he pointed to “emerging geopolitical developments in the Gulf region, increased economic uncertainty, fiscal pressures” and the province’s own austerity drive as the reasons behind it. Within that overall number, the provincial ADP itself was cut 26 percent to Rs385 billion, foreign project assistance dropped from Rs366.7 billion to Rs256 billion, and the deepest cut of all landed on the smallest, most local schemes: the district level funding for things like small clinics, drainage systems and rural roads, which was slashed from Rs55 billion to just Rs15 billion. That’s a 73 percent reduction. None of these are opposition talking points; they come straight from the province’s own budget documents.
What the province hasn’t done is tell anyone how that remaining Rs15 billion is actually being divided among its 30 districts. The Citizens’ Budget 2026 to 2027, the Finance Department’s own public facing summary, gives the province wide total and stops there. There’s no division or district breakdown in it, none in the Budget Strategy Paper, and none in any of the reporting from outlets that covered the Chief Minister’s speech in detail. That silence is worth sitting with for a second, because it isn’t as if no formula exists: Sindh’s own Finance Department has told the Public Accounts Committee in the past that district ADP funds are supposed to be allocated based on a district’s population and the NFC award formula. If that’s still how it works, the province already has these numbers sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere; it’s simply choosing not to publish them. So nobody outside the Finance Department can say whether a flood battered district in the north is absorbing the same roughly 73 percent hit as an urban district in Karachi, or whether some districts are quietly being spared while others take the fall.
That leaves an uncomfortable question hanging over the whole budget. If federal transfers keep climbing and provincial tax revenue is growing too, what actually justifies a cut this severe? Part of the story is a commitment Sindh made to hand back roughly Rs260 billion to the federal government, agreed at talks with the National Economic Council. But the province’s additional revenue this year was more than enough to absorb that without gutting development spending on this scale, especially given that current expenditure, mostly salaries, pensions and grants to public institutions, actually rose by about 20 percent over the same period. Education’s day to day budget climbed to Rs446.96 billion and health’s to Rs354.27 billion, even as their development side allocations were hollowed out: education’s ADP fell from Rs99.6 billion to Rs25.86 billion, a drop of roughly 74 percent, and health’s fell from Rs45.37 billion to Rs17.43 billion, down about 62 percent.
So if the extra money isn’t going into development, and it isn’t simply being swallowed by the federal grant, where is it going?
One case, unrelated to the mechanics of this particular budget gap, is worth mentioning just to illustrate how thin the oversight can get once public money leaves the treasury. The Sindh Solar Energy Project, a foreign funded scheme meant to bring solar power to underserved households, is currently under investigation after the Federal Board of Revenue found that more than 200,000 solar home system kits were imported between December 2024 and July 2025 at declared values of just sixteen to twenty three dollars per unit, against a contracted price of about 112 dollars per kit. The Senate Standing Committee on Economic Affairs was told that fake invoices worth $12.5 million had turned up, along with tampered import paperwork and suspicious remittances routed through entities in the UAE. The case has since been referred for proceedings under the Anti Money Laundering Act, and the Sindh government has passed it on to its own Enquiries and Anti Corruption Establishment. None of this proves where the NFC money actually went. It just shows that when you look closely at how Sindh spends money, irregularities aren’t hard to find.
The people of Sindh deserve a straight answer. Money keeps arriving in larger amounts every year, development spending keeps getting cut, and the province still won’t say how the little that’s left is being split among its 30 districts. So where does it actually go?
About the Author
